Reading Critically: Student Writers
Joe Harris
Well the first thing in getting people to read difficult texts and helping them to read difficult texts is to acknowledge that they're difficult; that this is not necessarily their problem but that these are complex materials and they're gonna take some time to get through. Another thing that you want to talk to students about is that almost everybody has to read a text at least twice before they can really make sense of it.

Beverly Moss
We have to talk to students about finding an opening. Sometimes that opening is, "I don't like this text." Then the next question is OK, tell me why. What is it about this text that bothers you? Because that may be the starting point for the discussion. Well, do you have an ideal text in mind? What does a good text do? So we have to give them openings that are comfortable for them, and one of those openings might be not liking it or not understanding, to make them understand that we all don't sit down and read from front to back cover and get it the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time.

Charles Turner
They haven't been taught to read critically and I have to explain to student what that means. They read passively. They passively go through materials, they don't think about what's being said. They don't consider the different points of view of historical analysis, in my case, in the area of history. And that has to be taught to them. That's part of the academic experience particularly at the higher level. So that's what we do. It's a lot of fun to watch a student open up to that…that new world of critical analysis.

Akua Duku Anokye
We want our students to interact with the text. And by interacting with the text they're interacting with the author. Anything is open. You can say what you liked, you can say what you didn't like, you can say where you thought they went off, you can say what you thought was valuable, you can pass all kinds of judgments, you can talk about how you might be able to use this in your work, or how you think that the author was really out in left field and why. So there's all these kinds of reactions – positive and negative – that we might get out of that kind of writing.

Thomas Fox
I think that is the most common thing that students say when they come to college, especially students who struggle. They don't understand. They don't understand the reading, they don't understand the textbook. They don't get it. And I don't think that in any kind of principled or organized way we help students do that. We don't help them gain some sort of mastery over those difficult texts. Usually, it isn't, in my experience it isn't a matter of not knowing enough vocabulary or not, not somehow being a good reader. It's a matter of their sense of themselves in an academic world. And they get bowled over via text. They will get so that they don't believe they can read it. Often, it's just a matter of just helping the students plow through the text and instead of being bowled over by it, bowl it over. And if you can help students say, if you can just assure them that good readers don't know all the words, that's just very common. You read through a text, you don't know a word, you keep going.

Cynthia Selfe
We bring to text lots of things that change the text as we read it. Now this might change when you read a digital text or an electronic text because we interact with it in different ways, but we're always shaping texts as readers if we're reading in an active and engaged way. We never…text is never static for readers.